TRUE CAR and ZAG Cyber Bandits, Parasites or Good for the Car Business?
Jim Ziegler asks...
I am hearing a lot of discussion about True Car and ZAG. I continually scratch my head and wonder if desperate dealers are doing the marketing limbo "How Low Can You Go?"
Are we so bad at what we do that we have to line up and pay vendors to lose money? AND, who is giving these people access to your data that is used against you?
Who owns these companies and what might be their ulterior motive? Sometimes I ask questions to which I already know the answer.
Am I wrong?
What do you think... JIM
Jim Ziegler's Guidance and Recommended Action Plan:
Ten Areas We Need to Concentrate on to Bring This Monster to It's Knees...
- Government investigation of ALL Data Aggregators taking consumer information from dealers' DMS. Sadly enough, dealers who do business with TrueCar are exposed to liability charges. Cut off all access to unecessary data, no matter who takes it from the dealers DMS and make it illegal to "resell identifiable consumer data" and "transactional data".
- Educate Your Fellow Dealers; If anyone takes financial transactional data, they expose the dealer that allowed it to violations, especially if it is passed on to other vendors or shared.
- Educate Consumers to what they're doing with their information...
a. You buy a car from a dealer, do you really want your personal information, and maybe even your financial information, passed along and sold and shared by "God knows who?"
b. These People Charge the Dealer $300 which the dealers have to build into the deal
c. Your Privacy and the Security of your Information could theoretically compromise your identity if you do business a company that takes data from the dealership. - Educate Investors and potential investors they could possibly be mislead if anyone is telling them this is a safe investment because of all of the dealers pushing back, associations pushing back, and government regulators in many states coming after TrueCar's business model as NOT compliant, in some cases they're saying it is Not Legal.
- AMEX, USAA and all of their affiliates do not want the bad consumer relations this push back is creating with their members and customers.
- Cancel your dealership's Affilation with TrueCar. Tell people with TrueCar certificates that YOU don't honor TrueCar and you feel the company is NOT reputable. Educate consumers as to perceived data exposure if they buy from a TrueCar dealer. Make sure that each consumer knows that using TrueCar actually increases their vehicle cost by $300 to $400.
- Make the dealers selling at huge losses take all of those deals. Big problem right now is too many Nissan Dealers and others are taking huge losers to get the factory money. The TrueCar reverse-auction business model will continually push those numbers down until the factory money is non-existent. Consumers need to hear from many dealers, "We don't do TrueCar"
- Keep calling your National and State Dealer Associations demanding they get involved and stay involved... No excuses.
- Get the Manufacturers into the game. If GM, Ford, Toyota, and other majors change the rules about how we advertise and do business to protect the dealers, we can cut off their ability to set pricing. So keep it up at every dealer meeting. Call your Dealer Council Members and protest to your factory reps. Tell the manufacturers, if they want showroom and facility improvements, we need the ability to make fair profits.
- Tell everyone you know. Educate other dealers and industry people. Watch the Painter interviews... I believe this is the first time a vendor has publicly announced they intend to bring down the dealers and hijack our business, taking our profits and starving us out with our own data. Painter has said manufacturers and dealers should go bankrupt and he, in his God-like way "will control distribution..."
When the TrueCar-Yahoo Deal kicks in we need to stand firm and "Just Say No" we don't honor TrueCar deals.
Read this article as a reference: http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=%2F20110831%2FFIN...
AND, if you doubt the mission... read this... http://www.zag.com/websiteASSETS/whitepapers/ZAG-WhitePaper3.pdf
Comment
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Comment by James A. Ziegler on January 20, 2012 at 6:10pm
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Zachary is here with me now reading all of this. he will sign on shortly after he joins, with a message for Mr. Dietz.
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Comment by Tom Drommond on January 20, 2012 at 5:54pm
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@Keith: Even a snake has guts. I didn't mean his courage, clearly he's a coward. I meant, I hope his freaking speen falls through his sphincter and the rest of his vital organs beat it to the ground.
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Comment by Keith Shetterly on January 20, 2012 at 5:47pm -
@ Tom: Deitz? What guts?? ;)
@ Jim: I'm so sorry about all this for you and your family.
@ TrueCar: It's on now. You just wait for NADA.
Keith
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Thanks Stan
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Thanks Tom... CarFax and many others, including TrueCar and their financial backers need to be outed...and that is coming directly after NADA Convention... we have some serious setbacks in the works for all of them... JIM
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Jim, you said something in passing that I'd like to hear more about. It was that CarFax is not the dealer's friend. Maybe they need to be "outed", too.
I'd like to see someone with a large voice take them on and challenge the information regarding price and value.
With regard to Dietz, what a piece of crap he is to drag family into a business discussion, just because he's losing the argument. Where does that fit into GRP's mission statement? I hope his sphincter loses tension and his guts fall out.
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Comment by Stan Sher on January 20, 2012 at 5:31pm
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What Jim has accomplished in his lifetime 95% of the world can't accomplish. Jim is not ashamed because he has built a following and people only respect him. He is an open book. Look no one is perfect as we have all had something happen to us good or bad. As a matter of face it is brilliant people who have done big things that have tragedies or things out of the ordinary happen. Guess what they deal with them and move on. Don't try attacking Jim for something so little. What happened to Zach is not the worst thing in the world. I know Zach. He is a good kid. He made a mistake.
Jim is a good man and has been an inspiration as well as a good friend. I will be damned if some lowlife piece of trash that represents a company like TrueCar try to make him look bad.
Alpha dawg tribe out...awooooooo awooooooooooo
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Comment by Larry Bruce on January 20, 2012 at 5:24pm
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WOW! I have sat here for 30 min just trying to think of what to say to this… I have no idea! This was turning ugly now it’s fallen off the ugly cliff!
@Steven I known Zach Ziegler personally since he was 10, he’s a good kid who has been through some typical kid stuff growing up, nothing I haven’t been through or probably anyone on this thread hasn’t been through. For you to even send a private email like that is reprehensible. Zach has nothing to do with this debate.
Passionate is one thing but digging up peoples past and family history…Steven you just crossed the line big time.
Time for the personal attacks to cease and stick to the issues this is very wrong.
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Comment by Chris Saraceno on January 20, 2012 at 5:08pm
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Wow,that is really low to go after family
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I think of this as The TrueCar Goon Squad coming after my family... low life.
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